Articles

Author(s):

Gregg Rock

Editor & Founder, BPMInstitute.org, BAInstitute.org and DBIZInstitute.org

Andrew Spanyi

Faculty Member, DBizInstitute.org and Managing Director, Spanyi International

According to a recent article in Forbes, there’s a high level of consistency on macro technology trend predictions for 2017 by organizations such as Gartner, Forrester, Deloitte, Accenture, and McKinsey. That’s not surprising as “digital transformation” is pretty much the leading buzzword in today’s corporate lexicon and executives scramble to get up to speed on related concepts such as social, mobile, cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive computing, analytics, and big data.

The Five Essentials of Operational Excellence

Author(s):

Marvin Wurtzel

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and Principal Consultant, Marvin M. Wurtzel & Associates, Inc.

Before an organization can embark on the journey to Organizational Excellence there are some conditions that need to exist beforehand. The five essentials are pre-existing conditions provide the foundation upon which the tools of Organizational Excellence are built.

The five essentials of Operational Excellence assumes that the organizational leadership and each functional area has a vision and a structure to direct its efforts, operates to principles, needs people to deliver value and tools to help develop basic capabilities and processes.

The five essentials of Operational Excellence are:

Vision
Structure
People
Principles
Tools

Each is an essential and critical element, creating a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.

1. Vision

BPM Readiness Assessment

Author(s):

Tom Dwyer

Editorial Director and current Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org

Is your company ready to apply the BPM discipline? A BPM Readiness Assessment offers a company an objective and efficient means to assess its ability to change and adapt to a process performance orientation. Understanding a company’s “process maturity profile” enables it to design a BPM adoption program that addresses six critical success factors that accelerate the adoption of BPM and specifies a program for realizing its sustainable value:

Linkage of process performance to business strategy
Employee understanding of process (skills and roles)
Utilizing BPM technology• Practicing process improvement methods
Process-related attitudes and behaviors
Implementing Process Governance (decision-making and oversight)

VALUE OF ASSESSMENT

Designing Federal Programs with the American People in Mind

Author(s):

Ken Mullins

Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

“To more fully realize the benefits of behavioral insights and deliver better results at a lower cost for the American people, the Federal Government should design its policies and programs to reflect our best understanding of how people engage with, participate in, use, and respond to those policies and programs.” – President Obama

High Performance through Digitalization – The BPM-Discipline as Value-Switch

Author(s):

Dr. Mathias Kirchmer

Managing Director | Co-CEO, BPM-D

The Digital World – a Powerful new Business Environment

The Business Architect’s Service Portfolio

Author(s):

Jeff Scott

President, Business Innovation Partners

For some time now I have been promoting the idea that the practice of business architecture is not about creating blueprints and models but applying a set of tools and techniques to form broader perspectives, create deeper insight, and solve business problems. If business architecture is a practice, then what is its portfolio of services and how do you create them?

Start with three best practices

There are three basic best practices for service development that lead to a powerful service portfolio.

10 Steps to Becoming an Agile Business Analyst (Part 2)

Author(s):

Jamie Cooke

Managing Director, Both Hemispheres, LLC

10 proven approaches for transitioning from a traditional business analyst role to an Agile business analyst role (Part 2 of 2) The first 5 steps to becoming an Agile Business analyst were outlined in part 1 of this article. Now, part 2 of this article provides you with five more tips for becoming a successful Agile Business Analyst.

Step 6: Be an Expert Communicator

Everything about the Agile business analyst role depends upon effective communication with business users, development team members, management, and executives to understand their needs and to act as a liaison across all parties. You should be equally comfortable speaking with stakeholders at both a big picture level and at a very detailed level, depending on what the situation requires.

Aligning Business Process Performance to Business Strategy

Author(s):

Tom Dwyer

Editorial Director and current Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org

In 2006 the Babson Process Management Research Center defined Strategic Alignment as the continual tight linkage of organizational priorities and enterprise processes, enabling achievement of business goals. Phrased differently this means linking strategy goals to operational goals and linking operational goals to process goals. This equates to defining a method for improving alignment among the organization’s performance measures, strategic plans, improvement projects, and budgets. It assumes that the organization employs a method for defining its business strategy such as a Balanced Scorecard (BSC). Using the BSC as an example one must first examine it to determine how BPM can be integrated into the BSC approach. BPM specifically focuses on improving the Internal Quadrant of the BSC. The Balanced Scorecard approach does the following:

Establishing a Business Architecture Practice: A Practical Approach

Author(s):

Whynde Kuehn

Principal, S2E Consulting Inc.

Once business architecture gains enough traction within an organization, it is important to formalize the practice. Having clarity of purpose, structure and intention for business architecture activities ensures that the team functions efficiently, is appropriately recognized, and can scale to meet the needs of the organization.

As a business architecture practice matures, the value it can deliver increases in strategic nature, scope and complexity. Establishing a successful, sustainable business architecture practice is a journey which takes time, particularly for large organizations. This article provides a practical perspective on how to establish and mature a practice over time considering the realities which many organizations face.

A Common Reality

Demonstrating the Value of Business Architecture before Determining a Business Architecture Tool

Author(s):

Columbus Brown

Sr. Business Architect, WAZA Consulting

State of the Practice

As Business Architecture emerges as an Agile business practice, practitioners are still struggling to demonstrate how valuable their unique perspectives and modeling efforts are inside their organizations. Many practitioners address this by spending their initial efforts crafting titles, defining governance, and searching for software to create and maintain highly detailed capability models. While organization, charters, and tools are vital to success, they are irrelevant if there is no team to govern or customer willing to listen to your business research insights. An obsession with detailed capability models or enforcing documentation standards without taking the time to understand culture and adoption, will end up being counterproductive. This approach often frustrates our customers, slows the overall adoption of the practice, and alienates us individually from the business.

Business Analysis Paralysis